Email encryption products have made major strides since we last looked at them nearly two years ago. They have gotten easier to use and deploy, thanks to a combination of user interface and encryption key management improvements, and are at the point where encryption can almost be called effortless on the part of the end user.

Our biggest criticism in 2015 was that the products couldn’t cover multiple use cases, such as when a user switches from reading emails on their smartphone to moving to a webmailer to composing messages on their Outlook desktop client. Fortunately, the products are all doing a better job handling multi-modal email.

In this review, we looked at five email encryption products, four of which employ encryption gateways and one that’s end-to-end. The gateways usually rely on plug-ins to Outlook and browsers so you can continue using your existing email clients. The end-to-end product requires new clients for all encrypted message traffic.

The five vendors include two that we reviewed in 2015: HPE/Voltage Secure Email and Virtru Pro. The other three are Inky (the end-to-end product), Zix Gateway, and Symantec Email Security.cloud.